A lot can be said about grindcore and the amount of bands that have been around in the last 10 years, and one thing that really stands out if you consider that brief period is that there has been a significant contribution from the Gulf Coast of the United States. We’ve seen that places like Houston and Dallas have produced some of the best extreme music to date, be it straight up grindcore, or death metal, hell, even powerviolence and then some.

I specifically want to focus on Houston and Gulf Coast Grindcore band Cryptic Void, which formed in 2014 with members from other Houston bands like Mindboil, Insect Warfare, P.L.F., Turbokrieg, Peasant and War Master.The music, however, speaks for itself, with tasty riffs that contain a nice blend of death metal and full throttle blasting, like a barrage from a Katyusha Rocket Launcher. Fast, destructive, brief, yet devastating. This is wholly embodied in their latest release titled Wasteland.

They’ve released some other material, which included Psychic Transgressor and the Psychic Transgressor EP, which blew me away completely, but they’ve kept pushing the boundaries, releasing their very own flavor of death metal influenced grindcore and it really does sit with the riff masters who are accommodated by some incredible drumming. You get everything from dive-bombs, to slow rhythmic riffs that make you wanna just fuck shit up in a pit. They went one better and earlier this year released as a promotional cassette in Wasteland to promote the band’s first full-length, which is due later this year.

If you haven’t heard of Cryptic Void before and you’re not taking notice, you, my friend are fucking up big time.